SAN JOSE, Calif. — Woody White, producer of "Hayden's T-ball Game" and "Haley Catherine's Princess Birthday," couldn't be more proud of his videography.

He's archiving priceless family memories with the most convenient camcorder he has ever used.

"I just love it," the attorney and married father of two from Wilmington, N.C., said of his DVD camcorder. "You just pop it out of your camera, put it in any DVD player, and there's no wires involved."

White bought it last year, helping to make DVD camcorders the fastest growing format in camcorder history. But new, lightweight tapeless models are now giving consumers more choices than ever. With hard-disk drives and flash memory, they're vying for attention with camcorders using the popular DVD format or the tried-and-true MiniDV, which records digitally to compact tapes.

Choosing a camcorder will depend on how much you're willing to spend, how you intend to use it, and what video quality you require. MiniDV camcorders offer some of the best bargains, with some models under $300. The tapes cost about $8 for a three-pack, and each cassette can store 60 minutes of video.

DVD camcorders, which offer the convenience of straight-recording to a DVD — without the need for any special cables for playback on a TV, are priced at $450 or more. Blank mini-DVD discs cost $15 for a 10-pack and hold 20 to 30 minutes of video, depending on the recording mode.

You'll pay $600 to $1,000 for hard-drive models that offer easy, instant access to any part of the video right on the camcorders themselves. Hard-drive camcorders also offer the most capacity, with 30-gigabyte models that can store seven hours of video at the highest-quality settings, and twice that in standard mode.

The tapeless models typically require users to transfer video footage to a computer to free up recording space. The transfer is fast and easy, similar to the click-and-drag of computer files and vastly different from the time-consuming process needed for MiniDV camcorders, in which the video must be played back in real-time.

Yet MiniDV camcorders offer the highest image quality because they don't digitally compress the video as much. By comparison, hard-drive, flash and DVD camcorders heavily compress a recording, usually in the MPEG 2 video format, to squeeze as much data as possible onto the storage medium.